Re:A "light" transistor to the rescue! (Score 3, Interesting)

The gluing process creates a material composed of larger electron-rich molecules with sufficient power to cause light that passes through to control the direction of other light, providing the switching capability, Sargent said.

With switching occuring at the speeds available through a layer such as that, there would be an incredible decrease in cumulative latency across the 'net. That is, if all or most of the switches are as above.

Although I am by no means a router expert, it would seem logical that a majority of the latency in the network is caused by the actual reception and subsequent "analysis" of the packets. After all, the "response time", or "spped" of electricity is at best close to the speed of light.

Thus, a majority of the time spent when moving packets around is probably spent on the routers, when processing the information. As such, switching to light based media should not have a noticable effect latency.

However, with the change of media, more data can probably be sent through the pipe, therefore increasing the overall speed of transfer in a favourable way.

Regardless, the technology certainly sounds exciting.